Reward
by Misila
Summary: Haruka was bad at English; that was a fact. Therefore, acknowledging his improvements was important.


_**Reward**_

.

At least five cats were huddled up together, sheltered from the rain under the porch of Haruka's garden. From a distance they looked like a single big, strange animal whose occasional meows filtered into the living room.

Half laying on the low table, cheek leaning on his arms, Rin stared at the sliding doors that separated the cats and the rain from him and Haruka, partly glad he was warmer than them, partly wondering if his boyfriend would allow the animals he often fed inside his house if asked enough times.

He turned his head around, looked as Haruka wrote on his English notebook in front of him. Rin soon noticed something wasn't right, though; Haruka's chin leant on the palm of his free hand, his elbow on the table, but that wasn't what gave him away. Rin would realise later he could tell Haruka wasn't doing his homework because there was no focused frown between his eyebrows.

In that moment, though, Rin only straightened up and quickly snatched the notebook from beneath Haruka's pencil.

"You have a worse attention span than an octopus," he muttered, exasperated. Haruka had been the one to ask for help with his English homework, after all, and judging by the number of creatures he had drawn he had spent the last fifteen minutes just doodling.

"Octopuses are actually pretty intelligent," Haruka replied, offended. "More than you, not that it's hard."

The jibe flew over Rin's head; he was too busy trying not to make any remark about how good Haruka's doodles were. His boyfriend already knew anyway.

"You did the exercise before getting distracted," Rin commented when he was finally able to look at the sentences in English, surprised. He groaned as soon as he read them, though, "wrong. You did it wrong. Well, four of the sentences are right, but you have to use the gerund in the fifth one."

"No."

Rin raised an eyebrow as he looked up at Haruka, not used to hear such confidence in his voice when it came to his less favourite subject. "Yes."

"No," Haruka repeated. He crawled around the table, sat next to Rin and pointed at the sentence. "There's a 'to' before, look."

"But it's 'look forward to'. It's a phrasal verb."

Haruka frowned. "So? The teacher said you put the infinitive after 'to'."

"Yes, but not in this case."

"Why?" Haruka asked, stubborn.

"Because that's how English works."

Haruka huffed. He was glaring at his notebook as if it had personally insulted him.

"That's not a reason."

"But it's the way it is."

"Then it makes no sense." Haruka crossed his arms. The more Rin looked at him, the more his boyfriend reminded him of an upset child. "Why does everyone have to know English?"

For a second Rin wondered if Haruka was too used to finding most things easy for his own good.

"Colonialism, I think," he answered. "And you'll need it if you really want to swim professionally, you know?" It certainly looked like a poor reason for Haruka. "But look at the bright side, you got four sentences right."

Haruka straightened up a bit. "And the others?"

"Uh, they're wrong." Rin smiled. "Four out of eight. Which is still better than last week, and means you would pass."

Rin didn't even have the time to dismiss the dangerous glint in Haruka's eyes as something he had just imagined before his boyfriend's lips caught his. Half alarmed, half giggling, Rin inched closer, welcoming Haruka's fingers tangling in his hair.

"You must be more desperate than I thought if just passing makes you this happy," he mumbled when he could breathe again.

"I'm not," Haruka replied. "This is just a reward for my improvements."

Rin hit the edge of the table with his elbow when his arm snuck around Haruka's waist, his free hand brushing his boyfriend's cheek before leaning in for another kiss. He hissed against Haruka's mouth, breath hitching when Haruka's tongue took advantage to slide between Rin's lips.

And as stupidly happy as Haruka's closeness made him, Rin couldn't forget giving in to primal instincts wasn't the reason he was in Haruka's grandmother's house.

(Not the _main_ reason, at least.)

(Yet.)

"Haru," he managed to breathe out when Haruka pushed him down, reasoning again when his head hit the floor, "you only got _half_ the questions right."

Leaning his weight on his knees, between Rin's legs, and elbows, on both sides of Rin's shoulders, Haruka pouted. "Then this is also an incentive."

"An incentive to keep studying, or to forget you suck at English?"

Haruka landed a peck on the tip of Rin's nose, pensive.

"Both."

Here's the thing: Rin was objectively stronger than Haruka. He was more than able to wrestle his boyfriend off him, even though it wouldn't be as easy as he'd like. Therefore, he was as guilty as Haruka of their unproductive afternoon.

"Don't blame me when you fail," he muttered.

Something in the impatience in Haruka's fingers curling around Rin's wrist when he grunted something about going to his bedroom told Rin he wouldn't.


End file.
